The United States often uses exaggerated civilian casualty
numbers to make a case for military intervention in strife-torn
regions

By Vijay Prashad

March 13, 2013 "Information
Clearing House"
-"The
Hindu" - Since the 1990s,
the West has justified its military interventions on liberal
grounds — to remove noxious leaders who oppress their people or
who have begun to conduct policies that appear genocidal. Buoyed
by the intervention in Yugoslavia and chagrined by the massacres
in Rwanda, the West pushed the United Nations to adopt a policy
in 2005 known as Responsibility to Protect (R2P). If the U.N.
establishes that genocide is impending, it is mandated to ask
its member states to act to protect civilians from such harm.
The actions directed include “appropriate diplomatic,
humanitarian and other peaceful means” that accord with the U.N.
Charter’s Chapters VI and VIII. If these measures do not work,
the U.N. is enjoined to act based on Chapter VII, namely to use
military force. R2P enshrined the doctrine of liberal military
intervention in the U.N.’s principles.

A year ago, India’s
Ambassador to the U.N. Hardeep Singh Puri offered a robust
criticism of the R2P doctrine. Ambassador Puri pointed out that
the U.N. uses the R2P doctrine “selectively”, and when the U.N.
selects a conflict for intervention, the armed phase is
immediate rather than “calibrated and gradual”. The selectivity
is a function of those who continue to exercise their power
through the U.N. bodies — which is to say that the West sets the
agenda for the use of the R2P doctrine.

Ambassador Puri had Libya
in mind when he made these remarks. The conflict in Libya opened
up in February 2011. Within a week, Ibrahim Dabbashi, the Libyan
deputy representative to the U.N., defected to the rebellion and
went before the television cameras on February 21, 2011.

“We are expecting a real
genocide in Tripoli.” Two days later, Al-Arabiya, the satellite
television channel owned by members of the Saudi royal family,
began to broadcast that in Libya, 50,000 people had been wounded
and 10,000 had been killed — all in the space of a week, with
the Gaddafi regime responsible for the lion’s share of the
massacres.

The source for this story
was Sayed al-Shanuka, the Libyan representative to the
International Criminal Court, who had defected to the rebellion.
Britain’s David Cameron and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy began to
call for a “no-fly zone” and some form of military intervention.
The question of R2P had already been raised. United States
President Barack Obama followed, the Arab League (under Saudi
pressure) fell in line, the U.N. voted for intervention and the
French bombers and U.S. cruise missiles struck. A few months
later, the corpse of Gaddafi was put on display in the streets
of Sirte.

The problem is that even
in February 2011, Human Rights Watch had not been able to
confirm more than a few hundred dead. Nonetheless, U.N.
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon began to speak of “press reports”
that the Libyan authorities were using helicopters to kill large
numbers of civilians.

U.S. Defence Secretary
Robert Gates and U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen
also spoke of “press reports”, but when challenged to
corroborate the satellite channels based on the full arsenal of
U.S. intelligence, said: “We have no confirmation.” Such
hesitancy did not stay the hand of the representatives who sat
around the horse-shoe table in New York, voting yes for
Resolution 1973, which allowed NATO to intervene militarily in
Libya.

The entire weight of the
argument in the U.N.’s Resolution 1973 rested on the claim of
“heavy civilian casualties”. News comes from the Libyan Ministry
of Martyrs and Missing Persons Affairs that the total number of
rebels and civilians killed during the conflict of 2011 is
4,700, with 2,100 additional people missing. This number does
not include the dead among Gaddafi’s forces (and likely the dead
in Gaddafi strongholds, such as Sirte). Miftah Duwadi, the
ministry’s Deputy Minister, told Libya Herald on January
7 that this is not yet an “exact figure” but it is what they
have for now. It is likely that the final numbers will not be
far from these provisional ones.

These findings from the
current Libyan government contradicts, in every aspect, the news
reports from Al-Arabiya and, of course, from the National
Transitional Council, whose consistent claim had been that tens
of thousands of civilians had been killed by the Gaddafi regime
in the first month of the uprising. It now appears that this is
not the case, and indeed, the numbers are far below the
threshold for genocide. This is a cautionary note for those who
uncritically accept what comes to them from the media, which
have specific interests in the outcome of conflicts. It also
begs the question as to how the U.N. arrives at some of its
figures.

The U.N. Human Rights
Council also made claims about genocide and crimes against
humanity in February and March 2011. It now turns out that the
private firm hired to collect, but not evaluate, the casualty
figures is Benetech, which is funded in part by the U.S.
Department of Defence. Not only does Benetech not critically
evaluate the figures that it touts, but its own interests might
not be as plainly scientific as it claims.

The U.N. had refused to
enjoin an evaluation of the NATO intervention based on reports
of civilian casualties from its bombing raids (as I had noted in
“When Protector Turned Killer”, The Hindu, June 11,
2012). There are no signs that the U.N. will consider an
evaluation of the way in which its R2P doctrine was suborned to
create a U.N. resolution to justify NATO intervention,
particularly in light of these new Libyan numbers.

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